It’s time for a revolution in Web search, UW professor says

Now is the time for a revolution in Web search, says Oren Etzioni, a computer science professor at the University of Washington. The way of Google and Bing, he says, is the way of the past.

“More and more we’re accessing the Internet from smart phones with tiny screens and awkward keyboards, or sometimes no keyboard at all. And sometimes you’re in your car … and talking to it,” Etzioni, director of the UW’s Turing Center, told seattlepi.com. “A list of blue links just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

Today, most of the time, search engines just scan indexed Web pages for whatever keywords the user types into a text box. What tomorrow’s search engines need to do is answer questions based on information they extract from the billions and billions of pages on the World Wide Web, he says.

The technology is rapidly developing. IBM’s Watson supercomputer, which competed in “Jeopardy” during a highly publicized contest this February, used its massive computing power to search the Web for answers to complex questions. It was even usually able to parse the quiz show’s famously pun-ridden and tricky questions.

“Watson shows us that the ability to draw answers from text is coming,” Etzioni said.

Already, such technology is showing up in commercial products. Google and Microsoft’s Bing are able to answer some specific searches – such as “Mariners score” – with relevant information on the results page. You can search for “Seattle weather” and and immediately get a forecast, without navigating to someplace like Weather.com.

Each search engine also allows for rough voice search through their various smart-phone apps, but the searches are still based on keywords. Wolfram|Alpha, a service for answering mostly scientific questions and mathematical equations, returns outstanding results much of the time, but not if you phrase your search incorrectly, Etzioni said.

“It’s a thousand points of light,” he said of such features, “little spots where they have this information. But it’s not a general feature of search.”

At the UW, Etzioni has been working on such “search intelligence” for more than a decade. In 2003, he founded Farecast, a UW spin-off that used databases and online information to predict airfares. Microsoft bought it up in 2008 and now incorporates the technology into Bing Travel.

At the Turing Center, named after the famous computer pioneer Alan Turing, Etzioni is working with students on an open-source tool called ReVerb, which seeks out relationships between online information. Another project, RevMiner, extracts information from Yelp reviews to help people find the best Seattle restaurants and shops.

Etzioni envisions a world – just three to five years from now – in which search engines scour the Internet based not on keywords, but on extracted information. Good voice recognition software also will be involved. Like most tech geeks, he said, he wants some “Star Trek” technology – in this case, talking to a computer – to no longer be science fiction.

“Computer, chart a course to wherever,” Etzioni imagined. “That is the experience we want, and we’re getting closer all the time.”

But, as he wrote in a two-page commentary in the Aug. 4 issue of Nature (the science journal), progress has been inhibited by what “seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination.” He wants academics – both at institutions and at companies – to double their efforts.

Google and Microsoft have teams of researchers working on data extraction, he said, but the companies also have brands to protect and consumers’ search habits to consider. In Redmond, Microsoft’s head of search, Qi Lu, knows there’s more in store for Bing.

“Search is still essentially a website finder.” Lu recently told The New York Times. “It’s all nouns. But the future of search is verbs — computationally discerning user intent to give them the knowledge to complete tasks.”

Meanwhile, smaller companies are starting to fill the search vacancy.

One such service is Siri, an iPhone app that mines online information to help users find answers. Apple bought the company earlier this year, and is expected to incorporate the technology into its popular mobile products.

“Technology is a disruptive cycle,” Etzioni said. “It’s often not the incumbents but a new player that comes in and stirs things up.”